McCall's tries to show off for your man

McCall's Show-Off Cookbook (1974) puts a flaming plum pudding right on the cover so you know they're serious about showing off.

I was honestly most interested in the "Plus" though. Cook your way into his heart with our man-tested menus? I am always interested in seeing gendered menus. What do you put out for the ladies' luncheon? What do you feed the girls at your daughter's sleepover? What foods will win instant access to his heart? According to old cookbooks, there are right answers.

The introduction to the section is a little scary, promising "All planned with malice aforethought, these recipes are designed specifically with your man in mind."

I'm not sure how they have any insight into the reader's man, but considering the booklet "can almost guarantee that you can cook your way into his heart-- and live happily ever afterward," I don't think it has much grasp on reality. Good cooking is never enough to guarantee happily ever after, even if you're trying to run a restaurant, which is much more dependent on good food than a romantic relationship.

And in any case, while the introduction seems to imply that the book will offer romantic little menus for two, the majority of the recipes in this section serve six, so I'm imagining an audition for all the eligible bachelors in the area. If bachelor #2 wants ketchup on his steak or bachelor #5 refuses to even look at any vegetable that has not first been breaded and deep fried, well, then the cook has some valuable knowledge about who will or will not make it to the dessert round.

I imagined there would only be a few menus, and they would mostly consist of things like steak and pommes frites and big slabs of apple pie. And yes, there were a few menus like that, but there were a lot more menus than I expected, and they were actually rather varied.

There's a fish menu, for example.

It's not a recipe for freshly-caught brook trout, perhaps meant to imply that the cook can fix whatever the fisherman boyfriend catches, but a French recipe: Sole Amandine. 

I love that McCall's has to add model ships in the foreground and background of the picture, though, as if that somehow makes the fish in a butter-and-lemon sauce with a sprinkling of almond slivers manlier. 

Plus, the menu calls for green vegetables: Brussels sprouts!

Granted, they're coated in cheese spread and breadcrumbs and walnuts, but they're still actual green vegetables. Plus there's a salad!

I wouldn't want to be within a mile of orange slices mixed with raw onions, but I guess the raw onions are there to make the salad manly?

And while dessert is a pie, it's not the thick slab of apple that I imagined.

Instead, it's an apricot-purée-in-gelatinized-ice cream confection, topped with a frilly lattice of whipped cream. This definitely sounds more like a recipe I'd expect for a ladies' luncheon than for a "man-tested menu."

A different menu in this section starts off with chilled soup, another dish that I thought would be more prevalent in ladies' luncheons than in "manly" repasts.

This soup starts out with a lot of cream-of-potato soup, though, so maybe all that potato makes it appropriate for the meat-and-potatoes types?

And this is a potato-heavy menu, though in some upside-down world. If you want the potatoes cold, have the soup. If you want them hot, have the salad! (Unfortunately, there's no recipe, but the menu does specify "Savory Hot Potato Salad.")

The menu also features a sweet main dish, which I thought of as more of a mainstay of ladies' luncheons.

The ham is cooked in a bottle of ginger ale under a blanket of brown sugar, then basted in more ginger ale, crusted in more brown sugar, and served in a sauce of currant jelly. In short, a sugar rush! 

This menu again offers a green vegetable that has not been battered and deep fried!

At least the lemon pie is "manly," eschewing the frothy meringue frill for a top crust.

Still, though... These menus make me think that no matter how relentlessly old cookbooks liked to gender the recipes, the ideas about what should be served to whom largely overlapped. Of course, women always had to cook and serve, but hey, it was an opportunity for a casting call, apparently. If the women had to pick somebody, better to cast a wide net and at least pick somebody who liked the same things as they did.